Rights of passage : an aesthetic cultivation of contingency

Abstract

The connections between creativity, contingency and necessity, loosely with respect to modernism, have a peculiar if not puzzling way of hinging on the nature of moving images and the experience of being still while beholding them, one after another. If we accept, after T.J. Clark, that contingency "is an issue of representation [and] not empirical life-chances," then contingency can emerge as a historical process in which representation can be seen to adapt to various crises of meaning by becoming more and more susceptible to meaninglessness. The medium of the moving image along with the passive position required of its spectators is here understood as offering a kind of formal invitation to contingency, giving it a permanent place in the realm of hermeneutics in the form of a symbolic threat against the powers of human agency. The primary objective of this thesis is to raise the stakes of contingency within modem aesthetics and demonstrate some ways in which the plight of contingency can become the purpose of subjectivity and hence the very medium of self-realization